The silver woods with light, the green slope throws
Its shadow in the hollows of the hill,
And wide the upland glows.”
It is now well into the middle of June. Like the lapwing in autumn, I have been making short flights here, there, and everywhere within a day’s march previous to the start on my “journey due north.”
Whatever it might be to others, with longer and wiser heads, to me the greatest difficulty has been in getting horses to suit. I have tried many. I have had jibbers, bolters, kickers; and one or two so slow, but so sore, that an eighty-one-ton gun fired alongside them would not increase their pace by a yard to the mile.
To get horsed may seem an easy matter to many. It might be easy for some, only it ought to be borne in mind that I am leaving home on a long journey – one, at all events, that will run to weeks and mayhap months; a journey not altogether unattended with danger – and that; my horses are my motor power. If they fail me I have nothing and no one to fall back upon. Hence my anxiety is hardly to be wondered at.
But here let me say that caravanning for health and pleasure had better not be undertaken with a single carriage, however well horsed. There ought to be two caravans at least. Then, in the event of coming to an ugly hill, there is an easy way of overcoming it – by bending all your horse-power on to one carriage at a time, and so trotting them over the difficulty.
To go all alone as I am about to do is really to go at considerable risk; and at this moment I cannot tell you whether I am suitably horsed or not.
But in the stable yonder stand quietly in their stalls Pea-blossom and Corn-flower, of whom more anon. Pea-blossom is a strong and good-looking dark bay mare of some fifteen hands and over; Corn-flower is a pretty light bay horse. They match well; they pull together; and in their buff leather harness they really look a handsome pair.
They are good in the feet, too, and good “doers,” to use stable phraseology. Corn-flower is the best “doer,” however. The rascal eats all day, and would deprive himself of sleep to eat. Nothing comes wrong to Corn-flower. Even when harnessed he will have a pull at anything within reach of his neck. If a clovery lea be beneath his feet, so much the better; if not, a “rive” at a blackthorn hedge, a bush of laurels, a bracken bank, or even a thistle, will please him. I’m not sure, indeed, that he would not eat an old shoe if nothing else came handy. But Pea-blossom is more dainty. It is for her we fear on the march. She was bought from a man who not only is a dealer, but is not ashamed to sign himself dealer; whereas Corn-flower was bought right off farm work.
Well, time will tell.
Yes, spring is waning, though hardly yet has summer really come, so backward and cold has the season been.
We have had our last day’s pleasant outing en famille. Mamma went, and even baby Ida, who is old enough to ask questions and make queer remarks.
A clear sky and the brightest of sunshine, though not distressingly hot. We crossed country for Wokingham. The trees very beautiful, though the leaves are already turning more crisp; in spring time, city reader mine, as the wind goes whispering through the trees, it seems as if every leaf were of softest silk; in summer the sound is a soughing or rustling one; but in winter the breeze moans and shrieks among the bare branches, and “blows with boisterous sweep.”
We unlimbered in the market square at Wokingham. The English are a novelty-loving people. This was well shown to-day, for streets and pavements were speedily lined to look at us, and even windows raised, while Modesty herself must needs peep from behind the curtains. In the afternoon a regiment of artillery came into the town, and popular attention was henceforth drawn to them, though our visitors were not few.
On our way home we passed the lodges of Haines Hill, the residence of the well-known T. Garth, Esq, a country squire of the true English type – a man who, although over sixty, almost lives in the saddle, and in the season follows his own hounds five days a week. The narrowness of the avenues and plenitude of the drooping limes forbade a visit to the manor, of which, however, as we went slowly along the road we caught many a glimpse red-glimmering through the green.
Great banks of pink and crimson rhododendrons gave relief to the eye. Looking to the right the country was visible for miles, richly-treed as the whole of Berkshire is, and with many a farmhouse peeping up through clouds of foliage.
The cottages by the roadside at this time of the year are always worth looking at. They vie with each other in the tidiness of their gardens, their porches, and verandahs.
They cultivate roses, all kinds and colours; standards and half-standards and climbers, crimson, white, yellow, pink, and purple. Stocks and wallflowers are also very favourite flowers. Even those cottages that cannot boast of a morsel of garden have the insides of every window all ablaze with flowering geraniums.
The memorable features of this pleasant day’s gipsying were flowers, foliage, and the exceeding brightness of the sunshine.
At Malta and in Africa I have seen stronger lights and deeper shadows, but never in England before. The sky was cerulean, Italian, call it what you like, but it was very blue. The sunshine gave beauty and gladness to everything and every creature around us. Birds, butterflies, and shimmering four-winged metallic-tinted dragon-flies flew, floated, and revelled in it. It lay in patches on the trees, it lent a lighter crimson to the fields of clover, a brighter yellow to the golden buttercups; it changed the ox-eye daisies to glittering stars, and gave beauty-tints innumerable to seedling grasses and bronzy flowering docks.
Under the trees it was almost dark by contrast. So marked, indeed, was this contrast that when a beautiful young girl, in a dress of white and pink, came suddenly out of the shadow and stood in the sunshine, it appeared to us as if she had sprung from the earth itself, for till now she had been invisible.
Before we reached home a blue evening haze had fallen on all the wooded landscape, making distant trees mere shapes, but hardly marring the beauty of the wild flowers that grew on each side of our path and carpeted the woodlands and copses.
This was our last spring outing, and a happy one too. From this date I am to be a solitary gipsy.
Solitary, and yet not altogether so. My coachman is, I believe, a quiet and faithful fellow, and eke my valet too. Then have I not the companionship of Hurricane Bob, one of the grandest of a grand race of jetty-black Newfoundlands, whose coats have never been marred by a single curly hair?
Nay, more, have I not also my West Australian cockatoo to talk to me, to sing with me, and dance when I play? Come, I am not so badly off. Hurrah! then, for the road and a gipsy’s life in earnest.
Chapter Seven.
A Start for the Far North – From Reading to Warwick
“O spires of Oxford! domes and towers,
Gardens and groves;
I slight my own beloved Cam to range
Where silver Isis leads my wandering feet.”
“A curious Gothic building, many gabled,
By flowering creepers hidden and entangled.”
There is to my way of thinking a delicious uncertainty in starting on a long caravan tour, without being aware in the least what you are going to do or see, or even what route you are going to take.
As regards a route, though, I did throw up a pebble with a black tick on it before the horses pulled out at the gate, and twice running the spot pointed to the north-west.
So we steered for Reading, and on without stopping as far as the Roebuck Hotel at Tilehurst. Nine years ago this hotel was a very small one indeed, but all gables, thickest thatch, and climbing roses and honeysuckle. The thatch has given place to red tiles, and an addendum of modern dimensions has been built. The old most ever give place to the new. But what lovely peeps there are from this hotel, from the balcony and from the bedrooms. It is a river house now in every